ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Disease mortality in domesticated animals is predicted by host evolutionary relationships.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 64 citations in OpenAlex.
- Are novel or locally adapted pathogens more devastating and why? Resolving opposing hypotheses.Ecology letters · 2024Pooled it
- Sublethal effects of parasitism on ruminants can have cascading consequences for ecosystems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Pooled it
- Host phylogenetic distance drives trends in virus virulence and transmissibility across the animal-human interface.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Pooled it
- Viral epidemic potential is not uniformly distributed across the bat phylogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Beyond Species Richness: The Importance of Phylogenetic Dimensions of Biodiversity in Disease Ecology.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Review
- Do specialist haemoparasites induce tolerance in their hosts?Parasitology · 2025Article
- A phylogenetic epidemiology approach to predicting the establishment of multi-host plant pests.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Reservoir host immunology and life history shape virulence evolution in zoonotic viruses.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Relationship between animal health and livestock farmers' wellbeing in Ghana: beyond zoonoses.BMC public health · 2023Article
- The host phylogeny determines viral infectivity and replication across Staphylococcus host species.PLoS pathogens · 2023Article
- Gaps in modelling animal migration with evolutionary game theory: infection can favour the loss of migration.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Investigating the outcomes of virus coinfection within and across host species.PLoS pathogens · 2023Article
- Heterogeneities in infection outcomes across species: sex and tissue differences in virus susceptibility.Peer community journal · 2023Article
- Age-dependent virulence of human pathogens.PLoS pathogens · 2022Article
- Insights in the Development and Uses of Alternatives to Antibiotic Growth Promoters in Poultry and Swine Production.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Assessing the risk of human-to-wildlife pathogen transmission for conservation and public health.Ecology letters · 2022Review
- Bats host the most virulent-but not the most dangerous-zoonotic viruses.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Parasite-associated mortality in birds: the roles of specialist parasites and host evolutionary distance.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Transmission models indicate Ebola virus persistence in non-human primate populations is unlikely.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- The future of zoonotic risk prediction.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Infectious diseases of domesticated animals impact human well-being via food insecurity, loss of livelihoods, and human infections. While much research has focused on parasites that infect single host species, most parasites of domesticated mammals infect multiple species. The impact of multihost parasites varies across hosts; some rarely result in death, whereas others are nearly always fatal. Despite their high ecological and societal costs, we currently lack theory for predicting the lethality of multihost parasites. Here, using a global dataset of >4,000 case-fatality rates for 65 infectious diseases (caused by microparasites and macroparasites) and 12 domesticated host species, we show that the average evolutionary distance from an infected host to other mammal host species is a strong predictor of disease-induced mortality. We find that as parasites infect species outside of their documented phylogenetic host range, they are more likely to result in lethal infections, with the odds of death doubling for each additional 10 million years of evolutionary distance. Our results for domesticated animal diseases reveal patterns in the evolution of highly lethal parasites that are difficult to observe in the wild and further suggest that the severity of infectious diseases may be predicted from evolutionary relationships among hosts.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.